About our Undersecretary 

Daniel Karpowitz has worked on public and private sector systems change for over twenty-five years.

Before joining the Lamont Administration, Daniel served for four years as a Special Advisor to the Governor of Minnesota, the State's first "Interagency Lead for Criminal Justice & Education" and as an Assistant Commissioner in the MN Department of Corrections. In these roles he envisioned and implemented a new infrastructure for Minnesota public higher education and worked closely with DOC line staff, facility wardens, and community supervision to pilot structural changes to policies, practices and procedures across the carceral system. For the Governor's office he led in the design and oversight of the administration's key metrics for criminal justice system change across three agencies and pioneered the creation of a "Data Analysys and Transformation Unit" within the MN DOC. During this time he supervised the educational system within Minnesota prisons, overseeing over a 22 million dollar budget, over a hundred staff across a dozen prisons, and the drafting a raft of successful legislative actions during the 2023 Session ranging from an historic expansion of education in prison to 2nd Chance Pell Readiness to sentencing reform and Justice Reinvestment.

From 2001 to 2019, Daniel served as the founding Director of Policy and Academics at the Bard Prison Initiative. He helped launch BPI's first-ever college semester in a single maximum security prison in 2001, and helped lead to become the heart of innovative, decarceral education activity flourishing across the U.S. and the world. He was the co-founder and Director of BPI's National Programs and served as Principal Investigator for its multi-year, multi-million dollar partnership with the Open Society Foundations that led to public/private partnerships between anchor institutions of higher ed and state agencies across the country including Notre Dame, Boston College, Yale, WashU, Northwestern, and others. Prior to joining BPI, he worked on juvenile diversion in the Philadelphia DA's Office, on residential red-lining with the Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, on class action settlements over race-based insurance markets in the State of New York, and on justice mapping and "million dollar blocks" with CASES in New York City.

At Bard College beyond BPI Daniel was Senior Lecturer in Law & the Humanities, served on the faculties of Political Science and Human Rights, and was a Research Fellow at the Levy Economics Institute. Over the course of his career he has been a Soros Justice Fellow, a Fulbright Fellow in law and society, and has twice been a Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He taught on slavery and the U.S. Constitution at the UC Berkeley Department of Rhetoric, and comparative law of equality at the Law Faculty of Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu. He has also many courses inside U.S. state prisons at all security levels. With Fr. Tom Curran, S.J., Daniel volunteers as a founding Commissioner of the Jesuit Prison Education Initiative.

During the Bush Administration Daniel was an early advocate for the restoration of Pell rights to Americans in prison, meeting frequently and collaborating with members of the U.S. House and Senate. He later advised the Obama Administration on "2nd Chance Pell", which set the stage for Congress's full restoration of Pell rights to 1.5 million Americans in 2020. He is the author of the play Quinta del Sordo, the essay "The Pardox of Punishment" in The Journal of Law, Society and Politics and the book College in Prison: Reading in an Age of Mass Incarceration (Rutgers, 2017).